FOUNDATIONALISM AND RATIONALITY

In the first four chapters, a theological critique was essayed of some dogmas and practices of the modern world, the heart of the argument taking the form that major deficiencies of thought and practice have theological roots, in, on the one hand, the Christian tradition's inadequate theology of creation and, on the other, what I called the modern displacement of God. In Chapter 4, I argued that part of the responsibility for the modern fragmentation of culture, and especially its loss of a coherent sense of meaning and truth, is to be laid at the door of Christian theology's traditional tendency to a monolithic conception of God and of truth. By a kind of reflex or reaction, it has given rise to modernity's displacement of deity, as a result of which a plurality of competing wills has replaced the single will of the tradition, but in such a way that the basis of a diverse but coherent culture has been lost. In many, though not all, parts of modern culture the loss of the concept of truth, and with it, all the connotations of objectivity and universality that it once had for much of Western intellectual history, has generated various mutually related but overwhelmingly disastrous moral, social and political outcomes.